Technical Field
The invention relates to video advertising. In particular, the invention relates to enhancing video advertising with engaging and interactive content.
Description of the Background Art
Video content is becoming increasingly popular on all display platforms. As a result, a large volume of video content is made available for viewing every day. Such video content ranges from product advertisements to entertainment videos. The upward Internet speed trend in the mobile domain and the world wide Web provides sufficient bandwidth to keep pace with the growth of video content, thus enabling accessibility of such video content on a variety of display devices easily and without disruption.
Online video advertising is also becoming increasingly popular due to the availability of mobile telephones, tablets, IP TVs, and other custom and proprietary devices. However, the traditional approach used in advertising over television does not provide users with the ability to interact with the advertisements. Such ability is embedded in currently available smart devices that show video content. Therefore, video advertisements can be more interactive due to the nature of these devices. However, not many video advertisements are presently interactive, except where they may provide a redirect link to a marketing landing page.
Consumer behavior is also different in the traditional TV and smart device market segments. In the smart device market segment, consumers are very time sensitive and tend to ignore the video advertisements by skipping or by switching to another device webpage, application, or channel whenever they encounter a long video ad. Typical video ads are long, i.e. 30 seconds. On an average, for every five minutes of video content displayed, content providers show 30 seconds of advertisements. So, 10% of user time is consumed in watching ads, and it gets worse when the same lengthy video ads are repeated multiple times. Not only does this frustrate the user, it also creates a negative impact on the brand and/or product that is being advertised.
As a solution, some the content providers provide the capability to skip ads if the user is not interested. In most cases, when a user skips ads, advertisers lose the opportunity to engage the users, while content providers waste the resources that are needed to display video ads that are skipped. Therefore, there is an incumbent need to engage users with the ads and content without making the ads a boring and to-be-avoided aspect of any online session.